So, I'm here at college, and I've quickly realized that I could really use a laptop in addition to my main desktop machine.

Now, I'm a cheapskate - my desktop box itself is a $800 'Barton 2500 Budget' machine. It does what I need, it's speedy, and I like it. I can play all the games I want on my Windows partition and Gentoo loves the thing.

What I'm really looking for is a laptop in the sub-$500 range that will let me install Gentoo with basic apps, listen to music, etc. I know one guy in our campus open source group (most use Gentoo) who actually still uses an old 233mhz Dell, with a Wifi add-on PC Card.

I've been looking on eBay and considering a P3 in the 500mhz-1ghz range, with a minimum of 128MB of RAM. Preferably a Dell or IBM, because it'll be used and those brands seem to hold up the best.

Any comments? Suggestions? Things to avoid? My experience with laptops is admittedly quite limited, and I leapfrogged from a K6-233 to an Athlon 1.14ghz in the desktop range a couple years back, so I kinda missed that whole generation of CPUs.

Don't get a compaq, dell, hewlett packard, or a few other brands. I'm on a compaq right now and my graphics processor isn't officially supported. Was really annoying to get 3D, took me a few months(perhaps even half a year) to figure it out._________________Come rapture, so I may inherit the earth.

Some of the Inspiron 1100's that have onboard video cards have the faulty BIOS. Dell decided to scrap the original BIOS for some of their laptops and created their own. Their new BIOS however broke alot of working things. There are alot of upset users on the Dell forums, especially since some of the users had perfectly fine laptops, but once they upgraded to the new BIOS many things stopped working. Sadly due to the nature of the BIOS upgrade, users can't even downgrade.

Dell laptops are cheap though, so if you do decide to get one be careful about the model and the BIOS. Good luck._________________~::Lost Sig::~
I lost my Sig somewhere....It was clever and witty with a shade of sarcasm. If you find my sig please let me know; I miss it dearly.

I've been looking on eBay and considering a P3 in the 500mhz-1ghz range, with a minimum of 128MB of RAM.

I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e that has been running Gentoo for the past year. It has a 700 MHz P3 and it's decently fast, although no speed demon. To give you an idea, 2.6 kernel compiles take about 45 minutes, and emerging KDE took me a good 24 hours from beginning to end.

I would not necessarily recommend getting a Dell, primarily because I think their build quality is pretty bad.

I would strongly recommend, however, that you get as much RAM as you possibly can. I had 128 MB of RAM in this laptop, and bumped it up to 512 MB, which is the max for this particular laptop. Adding RAM really helped with boosting performance. Prior to addding RAM, there was a lot of disk swapping, which really slows things down on a laptop, due to the relative slowness of the laptop hard drive compared to most desktops._________________I'm only hanging out in OTW until I get rid of this stupid l33t ranking.....Crap. That didn't work.

I agree with wilburpan. RAM is more determent of laptop speed than it's processor.

I have a HP Omnibook XE3 (first model of that line). It's a Celeron 550 with 128MB. It runs XFCE4, and does very well. It really impresses classmates that my laptop responds faster than their laptops (they all have about 2.4 Ghz or 2500+'s in their laptops). I even got one to convert to gentoo .

Offcourse compiling was a bitch, so I put distcc on it, and let my desktop compile for it. That really helps._________________we are microsoft, lower your firewalls and surrender your pc's. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. your culture will adapt and service us. resistance is futile.

I've got a Thinkpad, works beautifully. IBM has a nifty site where you can see which of their laptops have been linux-certified. Too bad they don't have Gentoo listed, but I guess it's all the same._________________#define NULL rand() /*heh heh heh */

The one thing that bugs me about the laptop market today is all the Celeron 2.4ghz machines. The new Celerons 2.xs are slower then Duron 1.6, and WAY slower then Barton 2500+ in the desktop or mobile form. Yet, all the bargin laptops have crappy Celerons 2.xs - I even say an ad for to "upgrade" a new machine from a "Barton 2500+ Mobile (runs at 1.83ghz) to a Celeron 2.6ghz for $250" - what a ripoff!

I'd rather spent $500 on a good used laptop and $150 on beefing up the RAM then $650 to get a useless, crippled machine with a Celeron 2.4. Although in reality, $300-$400 is probably what I'd pay on the laptop itself.

Anyway, I've been seeing a lot of Thinkpad 600-series P3s on eBay. I really wish there was a local place where I could go look at some though, like a hardware clearinghouse for government used stuff or something. It'd make this a lot easier.

Get a used powerbook or ibook. The are more likely to bee in good condition. Thinkpads are ok too. Don't get a dell. Dells fall appart so they are a bad idea, especially for a secondhand lappy._________________Aim:gsfgf0

Not with that particular model, but I know that Thinkpads have a reputation of being durable laptops that can take a punch and are good on the hardware side of things.

Evangelion: I might put KDE3.2 on it (I really like it on my desktop, been a Gnome guy before), but just loading XFCE4 and X only takes up about 40 megs. That leaves a lot open to use something like oowriter or jedit._________________we are microsoft, lower your firewalls and surrender your pc's. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. your culture will adapt and service us. resistance is futile.

I can't believe that Dells fall apart, but I'll take your word for it. Leaning towards IBM anyway because I've just always wanted a Thinkpad.

Of course, Centrino > Celeron because it has more letters!

Anyone have any experience with IBM Thinkpad 600X's @500mhz?

Yes, i have had experience with the IBM Thinkpad 600s, mine is a p3 500 mhz, and it has 192 mb of ram... i had mandrake on it, and it ran GREAT with kde 3.1... if you opted to get one of those i would say all the way!_________________Blog

BTW, i payed about $500 US for it. Great deal, it had been leased by a company and then it was sold to who i bought it from, and it runs like a dream. Of course, this was ~2 years ago, so they might be less nowadays _________________Blog

got a toshiba here, runs damn fine, its got arch linux on it current, it has had suse *fine*, redhat 8 *fine* and gentoo *fanastic*. i do need to redo it for gentoo actually i just cant face 21hrs of compiling *sigh* stupid celeron. but it ran damn fine once it was all setup _________________Some people go to counselling,
others use linux